Site Mobile Navigation

House Shuts Down Its Page Program

At the Rayburn House Office Building, Congressional pages are officially a thing of the past.Credit
Jamie Rose for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the more than 175 years since young people began coming to Washington to work as Capitol messengers, the experience of being a Congressional page has marked the start — and on occasion the scandalous end — of many a political career.

Now the ubiquitous teenage pages, with their navy blue blazers and earnest looks, will disappear from the House side of the Capitol — a victim, House leaders said Monday, of budget cuts and improvements in technology, like BlackBerrys, that have rendered their document-ferrying and message-taking duties obsolete.

The announcement came in a “Dear Colleague” letter to lawmakers from Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, who said they decided to terminate the program after a review by outside consultants raised concerns about its costs and effectiveness.

The news caught alumni of the program, including current and former members of Congress, by surprise. Many called it short-sighted. (The pages will not disappear from the Capitol entirely; the Senate will still have them.)

“There was no consultation by the leadership with the members,” complained Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat and longest-serving member of the House, who was a page in the late 1930s and early 1940s. “It is removing a wonderful opportunity for a lot of youngsters to participate in their government, where they could actually learn how the country runs.”

But in recent years, the program has been touched by scandal, raising questions about the safety and supervision of the House pages, typically high school juniors who live in dormitories and attend school while in Washington.

In 2006, Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, resigned amid accusations that he had sent sexually explicit messages to young men who had been pages. The year after that, four pages were expelled from the House program amid accusations of shoplifting and sexual misconduct within their ranks. Those allegations prompted Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Boehner to pledge a thorough review.

Some lawmakers called even then for Congress to dismantle the page program. But backers of the program, like Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, who served as a page in the 1970s, called for better oversight.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Turley said Monday that the program, which falls under the oversight of a board that includes members of Congress, one parent and one former page, could be better administered solely by alumni, who maintain an active association. He said graduates of the page program might have banded together to raise money to keep it going, had they been made aware that its future was in jeopardy.

“There’s a simple elegance and power to having the rising generation present in our government,” Mr. Turley said. “This is an institution that is truly priceless that is being put up on the block to save an insignificant amount of money.”

In their letter released Monday, the leaders said the outside review calculated the total annual costs of the program at more than $5 million, not including capital costs associated with the page dormitory and school. The annual cost of educating each of the 72 pages runs as much as $80,000 per year, the study found — far more than college tuition.

While “dozens of pages were once needed on the House floor to deliver a steady stream of phone messages” to lawmakers, the leaders wrote, most members of Congress now rely on their mobile phones for instant communication. Documents, too, are transmitted electronically, leaving some pages without enough to do, the letters said.

That, said Jessica Wilkerson, was her sense as a 16-year-old House page, coming from Colorado, in the summer of 2007. In the wake of the Foley scandal, she felt closely supervised — “We had curfews, we had room checks, there were certain places we could and couldn’t go,” she said — but was more idle than she had expected to be.

“We actually had quite a bit of down time,” said Ms. Wilkerson, now 20 and a rising junior at Syracuse University. She sounded wistful in saying so, and added that she felt the real value of the program was not the work the pages performed for lawmakers, but the experience of “getting involved in politics, especially when so many of us wind up not caring later on.”

The House page program will technically end at the end of this month. But, this being August in Washington, lawmakers have already gone home to their districts. The navy-jacketed pages are already gone, too; they left town on Friday, unaware that their ranks would be gone from the House for good.

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2011, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: House Shuts Down Its Page Program. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe